“Duke,” I said, with extreme emotion, for I fancied I could catch the shine of most unaccustomed tears in his dark eyes, “my good, dear fellow, what is the meaning of this? I would do anything to make you or Dolly happy; but where is the sense of half-measures? If you feel like this, why don’t you—I say it with all love—why don’t——”
He struggled to his feet, and with a wild, pathetic action drew emptiness about him with enfolding arms.
“I tell you,” he cried, in a broken voice, “that I would give my life to stand in your shoes, valuing the evil as nothing to the sweet.”
He dropped his head on his breast and I had no word to say. My willful blindness seemed to me at that moment as vile a thing as any in my life.
Suddenly he stood erect once more.
“Renny,” he said, with a faint smile, “for all your good friendship you don’t know me yet, I see. I’m too stiff-jointed to kneel.”
“Don’t curse me for blighting your life like this. But, Duke—I never guessed. If I had—it didn’t matter to me—I would have walked over a precipice rather than cross your path.”
“How could you know? Wasn’t I sworn to philosophy?”
“And it can’t be now?”
“It can never be.”
“Think, Duke—think.”
“I never do anything else. Love may exist on pity, but not on charity. I put myself on one side. It is her happiness that has to be considered first; and, Renny, you know the way to it.”
“Duke, have you always felt like this toward her?”
“Always? I feel here that I should answer you according to my theory of life. But I have shown you my weak side. Every negro, they say, worships white as the complexion of his unknown God. From my first sight of her I have tried to rub my sooty soul clean—have tried every means like the ‘Black-Gob’ committee in Hood’s poem.”
“I think you have been successful—if any rubbing was necessary. I think at least you have proved your affinity to her, and will claim and be claimed by her in the hereafter.”
“I shall not have the less chance then, for striving to procure her happiness here.”
“Oh, Duke—no!”
I stood abashed in presence of so much lofty abrogation of self.
“What am I to do?” I said, humbly. “I will be guided by you. Shall I study to make our interests one and trust to heaven for the right feeling?”
“First tell her what you have told me. You need have no fear.”
“Very well. I will do so on the first opportunity.”
“That confidence alone will make a bond between you. But, Renny—oh, don’t delay.”
“I won’t, Duke—I won’t. But I wish you would tell me what danger it is you fear.”
“If I did you would think it nothing but a phantom of my brain. I have said I see in the dark. This room is full of fantastic shapes to me. Perhaps they are only the goblin lights born of warp and disease.”
“I will speak to her next Sunday.”
“Not sooner?”
“I can’t very well. We must be alone together without risk of interruption.”
I would have told him of our yesterday’s talk, only that it seemed a cruel thing to take even him into that broken and tender confidence.
“Very well. Let it be then, as you value her happiness.”
All day it had been close and oppressive and now thunder began to moan and complain up the lower slopes of the night.
Suddenly, in the ominous stirring of the gloom, I became conscious that my companion was murmuring to himself—that a low current of speech was issuing from his lips monotonous as the babble of delirium.
“There was a window in the roof, where stars glittered like bubbles in the glass—and the ceiling came almost down to the floor on one side and I cried often with terror, for the window and I were alone. Sometimes the frost gathered there, like white skin over a wound, and sometimes the monstrous clouds looked in and mocked and nodded at me. I was very cold or else my face cracked like earth with the heat, and I could not run away, for he had thrown me down years before and the marrow dried in my bones. There had been a time when the woman came with her white face and loved me, always listening, and crept away looking back. But she went at last and I never saw her again.”
“Duke!” I whispered—“Duke!” but he seemed lost to all sense of my presence.
“He came often, and there was a great dog with him, whose flesh writhed with folds of gray, and the edges of his tongue were curled up like a burning leaf—and the dog made my heart sick, for its eyes were full of hate like his, and when he made it snarl at me I shivered with terror lest a movement of mine should bring it upon me. And sometimes I heard it breathing outside the door and thought if they had forgotten to lock it and it came in I should die. But they never forgot, and I was left alone with the window in the roof and nothing else. But now I feel that if I could meet that dog—now, now I should scream and tear it with my teeth and torture it inch by inch for what it made me suffer.”
I cried to him again, but he took no heed.
“There was water, in the end, and great dark buildings went up from it and the thunder was thick in the sky. Then he said, ‘Drink,’ and held something to my lips; and I obeyed because I was in terror of him. It was fire he gave me, and I could not shriek because it took me by the throat—but I fell against the water and felt it lap toward me and I woke screaming and I was in a boat—I was in a boat, I tell you.”
There came a booming crash overhead and the room for a moment weltered with ghastly light. In its passing I saw Duke leap to his feet, and there was something beside him—a shape—a mist—one of the phantoms of his brain—no, of mine—Modred, pointing and smiling. It was gone in an instant—a mere trick of the nerves. But, as I stood shivering and blinded, I heard Duke cry in a terrible voice:
“Renny—listen! It was on such a night as this that my father poisoned me!”
Long after the storm had broken and rolled away were we still sitting talking in the dim lamplight. In these hours I learned what dark confidences my friend had to give me as to his solitary and haunted past; learned more truly, also, than I had ever done as yet, the value of a moral courage that had enabled him, dogged by the cruelest hate of adversity, to emerge from the furnace noble and thrice refined.
He had been picked up, as a mere child drowning in the river, by the Thames police and had been ultimately consigned to a charity school, from which, in due course, he had been apprenticed to a printer. Thus far had his existence, emerging from profoundest gloom, run a straight and uneventful course—but before?
Into what deadly corner of a great city’s most secret burrows his young life had been first hemmed and then crushed out of shape who may say? When I had got him down again, unnerved but quiet now and wistful with apology over his outburst, he told me all that he knew.
“Thunder always seems to turn my brain a little, Renny, perhaps because it is associated in the depths of my mind with that strange young experience. The muttering sound of it brings a picture, as it were, before my eyes. I seem to see a confusion of wharfs and monstrous piles of blackness standing out against the sky; deadly water runs between, in which smudges of light palpitate and are splintered into arrows and come together again like drops of quicksilver.”
“And you are given something to drink?”
“It is poison; I know it as certainly as that it is my father who wishes to be quit of me. I can’t tell you how I know.”
“And before?”
“There is only the room and the window in the roof, and myself, a sickly cripple lying in bed, always alone and always fearful of something.”
“Duke, was the gentle woman your mother?”
“I feel that it must have been. But she went after a time. Perhaps he killed her as he wished to kill me.”
“Can you remember him at all?”
“Only through a dreadful impression of cruelty. I know that I am what I am by his act; though when made so, or under what provocation, if any, is all a blank. It is the dog that haunts my memory most. That seems queer, doesn’t it? I suppose it was the type or symbol of all the hate I was the victim of, and I often feel as if some day I shall meet it once more—only once more—and measure conclusions with it on that little matter of the suffering it caused me.”
We fell silent for awhile. Then said I, softly: “Duke, with such a past for background, I think I can understand how Dolly must stand out in the front of your picture.”
“Yes,” he said, with a tender inflection in his voice. “But anyhow I have no quarrel with her sex. What should I have been without that other presence in the past? I have known only two women intimately. For their sake my right arm is at the service of all.”
His eyes shone upon me from the sallow, strong face. He looked like a crippled knight of errantry, fearless and dangerous to tamper with where his right of affection was questioned.
The week that followed was barren of active interest. It was a busy one at Great Queen street, and all personal matters must needs be relegated to the background. Occasionally I saw Dolly, but only in the course of official routine, and no opportunity occurred for us to exchange half a dozen words in private.
Nevertheless, there was in the dusty atmosphere of the place a sensation of warmth and romance that is scarcely habitual to the matter-of-fact of the workshop. Compromise with my heart as I might on the subject of Zyp’s ineffaceable image, I could not but be conscious that Ripley’s at present held a very pretty and tender sentiment for me. The sense of a certain proprietorship in it was an experience of happiness that made my days run rosily, for all the perplexity in my soul. Yet love, such as I understood it in its spiritual exclusiveness, was absent; nor did I ever entertain for a moment the possibility of its awakening to existence in my breast.
So the week wore on and it was Saturday again, and to-morrow, for good or evil, the question must be put.
That evening, as Duke and I were sitting talking after supper, Jason’s voice came clamoring up the stairs and a moment after my brother burst into the room. He was in high spirits—flushed and boisterous as a young Antinous—and he flung himself into a chair and nodded royally to Duke.
“Renny’s chum, I suppose?” said he. “And that’s a distinction to be proud of, for all it’s his brother that says so. Glad to know you, Straw.”
Duke didn’t answer, but he returned the nod, striving to gloze over prejudice genially for my sake.
“Renny, old chap!” cried Jason, “I sha’n’t want my friend at court yet—not yet, by a long chalk, I hope. Look here.”
He seized a purse from his pocket and clapped it down on the table with a jingling thud.
“There’s solid cash for you, my boy! Forty-three pounds to a penny, and a new pleasure to the pretty face of each of ’em.”
“Where on earth did you get it, Jason?”
“Won’t you be shocked, Barebones? Come with me some night and see for yourself.”
“You’ve been gambling, I believe.”
“Horrid, isn’t it?—the wailing baby and the deserted wife and the pistol in a garret—that’s what you are thinking of, eh? Oh, you dear thing! But we aren’t built alike, you and I.”
“Be quiet, can’t you?” I cried, angrily.
“Not a bit of it. I’m breezy as a weathercock to-night. I must talk, I tell you, and you always rouse the laughing imp in me. Where’s the harm of gambling, if you win? Eh, Jack Straw?”
“It’s no very good qualification for work, if that’s what you want to get, Mr. Trender.”
“Work? Hang the dirty rubbish! Work’s for the poor in pocket and in spirit. I want to see life; to feel the sun of enjoyment down to my very finger-tips. You two may work, if you like, with your codes of cranky morals. You may go back to your mill every Monday morning with a guilty sense of relief that another weekly dissipation on Hampstead heath is over and done with. That don’t do for me. The shops here aren’t all iron-ware and stationery. There’s color and glitter and music and rich food and laughter everywhere around, and I want my share of it. When I’m poor I’ll work; only—I don’t ever intend to be poor again.”
“Well, we don’t any of us intend to, for the matter of that,” said Duke.
“Oh, but you go the wrong way about it. You’re hampered in the beginning with the notion that you were made to work, and that if you do it in fine manly fashion your wages will be paid you in full some day. Why, what owls you are not to see that those wages that you think you are storing up so patiently are all the time being spent by such as me! Here’s happiness at your elbow, in the person of Jason Trender—not up in the skies there. But it’s your nature and luckily that’s my gain. You wouldn’t know how to enjoy ten thousand a year if you had it.”
“You think not?”
“I know it. You’d never be able to shake off the old humbug of responsibility.”
“Toward others, you mean?”
“Of course I do, and that’s not the way to make out life.”
“Not your way?”
“Mine? Mine’s to be irresponsible and independent—to act upon every impulse and always have a cat by me to claw out the chestnuts.”
“A high ideal, isn’t it?”
“Don’t fire that nonsense at me. Ideal, indeed! A cant term, Jack Straw, for a sort of religious mania. No ideal ever sparkled like a bottle of champagne. I’ve been drinking it for the first time lately and learning to play euchre. I’ve not proved such a bad pupil.”
He slapped the pocket to which he had returned his purse, with a joyous laugh.
“Champagne’s heaven!” he cried. “I never want any better. Come out with me to-morrow and taste it. Let’s have a jaunt!”
Duke shook his head.
“We shouldn’t agree in our notions of pleasure,” said he.
“Then, come you, Renny, and I’ll swear to show you more fun in a day than you’ve known in all your four years of London.”
“I can’t, Jason. I’ve got another engagement.”
“Who with?”
“Never mind. But I can’t come.”
“Oh, rubbish! You’ll have to tell me or else we go together.”
“Neither the one nor the other.”
For a moment he looked threatening. “I’m not fond of these mysteries,” he said. Then his face cleared again.
“Well,” he cried, “it’s a small matter for me, and, after all, you don’t know what you miss. You don’t keep whisky here, I suppose?”
“No, we don’t drink grog, either of us.”
“So I should have thought. Then I’ll make for livelier quarters”—and crying good-night to us, he went singing out of the room.
The moment I heard the outer door shut on him, I turned to Duke.
“Don’t hold me responsible for him,” I said. “You see what he is.”
“Renny,” said Duke, gravely, “I see that friendship is impossible to him, and can understand in a measure what he made you suffer.”
“Yet, I think, it’s true that he’s of the sort whom fortune always favors.”
“They sign a compact in blood for it, though, as the wicked baron does in the story books.”
He smiled and we both fell silent. Presently Duke said from the darkness:
“Where has he put up in London?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. I’m not particularly anxious to find out as long as he keeps away from here.”
“Ah, as long as he does,” said my companion, and sunk into a pondering fit again.
“Get off early to-morrow,” he said, suddenly. “What time have you arranged to—to meet Dolly?”
“Half-past nine, Duke.”
“Not before? Well, be punctual, there’s a good fellow. She’s worth an effort.”
I watched him, as he rose with a stifled sigh and busied himself over lighting our bedroom candle. In the gusty dance of the flame his eyes seemed to change and glint red like beads of garnet. I had no notion why, but a thrill ran through me and with it a sudden impulse to seize him by the hand and exclaim: “Thank God, we’re friends, Duke!”
He startled a little and looked full in my face, and then I knew what had moved me.
Friends were we; but heaven pity the man who made him his enemy!
Dolly met me the next morning, looking shy and half-frightened as a child caught fruit-picking. She gave me her hand with no show of heartiness, and withdrew it at once as if its fingers were the delicate antennae of her innocent soul and I her natural enemy.
“Where shall we go, Renny?” she asked, glancing timidly up at me.
“To Epping again, Dolly, dear. I’ve set my heart on it.”
She seemed at first as if about to ask me why; then to shrink from a subject she dreaded appearing to have a leading interest in.
“Very well,” she answered, faintly. “It will be lovely there now.”
“Won’t you help a poor woman to a crust of bread, kind lidy?” said a voluble whining voice at our ears, and a sturdy mendicant thrust her hand between us. She was a very frouzy and forbidding-looking mendicant, indeed, with battered bonnet askew and villainous small eyes, and her neighborhood was redolent of gin.
“Spare a copper, kind lidy and gentleman,” she entreated, with a bibulous smirk, “and call down the blessings of ’eving on a widowed ’art as ’an’t tysted bit or sup since yesterday come to-morrer, and five blessed children wantin’ a ’ome, which it’s the rent overdue and these ’ands wore to knife powder scrapin’ in the gutters for scraps which one crust of bread would ease. Kind lidy, oh, just a copper.”
Dolly was for putting a charitable hand into her pocket as the creature followed us, but I peremptorily stopped her and would not have her imposed upon.
“Kind lidy,” continued the woman, “I’ve walked the streets all night since yesterday morning and the soles off my feet, kind lidy; won’t you spare a copper? And I dursn’t go ’ome for fear of my man, and I buried the youngest a week come yesterday, and praise ’eving I’m a lonely widder, without child or ’usband, kind lidy; just a copper for the funeral—and rot the faces off of you for a couple of bloomin’ marks in your silks and satings and may you die of the black thirst with the ale foamin’ in barrils out of reach. You a lidy? Oh, yes, sich as cocks her nose at a honest woman starvin’ in her rags, and so will you some day, for all your pink cheeks, when you’ve been thrown over like this here bloomin’ bonnet!”
She screamed after us and caught the moldy relic from her head and slapped it upon the pavement in a drunken frenzy, and she reviled us in worse language than I can venture to record. Poor Dolly was frightened and urged me tremblingly to hurry on out of reach of that strident, cursing voice. I was so angry that I would have liked to give the foul-mouthed harridan into custody, but the nervous tremors of my companion urged me to the wiser course of leaving bad alone, and we were soon out of earshot of the degraded creature.
“Renny,” whispered the girl in half-terrified tones, “did you hear what she said?”
“What does it matter what she said, Dolly?”
“She cursed me. God wouldn’t allow a curse from a woman like that to mean anything, would He?”
“My dear, you must cure yourself of those fancies. God, you may be sure, wouldn’t use such a discordant instrument for His divine thunders. The market value of her curse, you see, she put at a copper.”
She looked up at me with her lips quivering a little. She was evidently upset, and it was some time before I could win her back to her own pretty self.
“I wish the day hadn’t begun like this,” she said in a low voice.
“It shall come in like the lion of March, Dolly, and go out like a lamb—at least, I hope so.”
“So do I,” she whispered, but with the fright still in her eyes.
“Why, Dolly,” I said, “I could almost think you superstitious—and you a Ripley hand!”
She laughed faintly.
“I never knew I was, Renny. But everything seemed bright and peaceful till her horrible voice ground it with dust. I wonder why she said that?”
“Said what, Dolly?”
“That about being thrown over.”
“Now, Doll, I’ll have no more of it. Leave her to her gin palace and set your pretty face to the forest. One, two, three and off we go.”
We caught our train by the tail, as one may say, and took our seats out of breath and merry. The run had brought the bloom to my companion’s face once more and the breeze had ruffled and swept her shining hair rebellious. She seemed a very sweet little possession for a dusty Londoner to enjoy—a charming garden of blossom for the fancies to rove over.
Ah, me; how can I proceed; how write down what follows? The fruit was to fall and never for me. The blossoms of the garden were to be scattered underfoot and trodden upon and their sweet perfume embittered in death.
As we walked down the platform a voice hailing me made the blood jump in my heart.
“Renny—Renny! What brings you here? Why, what a coincidence! Well met, old fellow! And I say, won’t you introduce me?”
“Miss Mellison—this is my brother.” I almost added a curse under my breath.
I was striving hard for self-command, but my voice would only issue harsh and mechanical. He had overreached me—had watched, of course, and followed secretly in pursuit.
“How delighted I am to meet you,” he said. “Here was I—only lately come to London, Miss Mellison—sick for country air again and looking to nothing better than a lonely tramp through the forest and fate throws a whole armful of roses at me. Are you going there, too? Do let me come with you.”
Dolly looked timidly up at me. We had left the station and were standing on the road outside.
“Oh, Miss Mellison’s shy in company,” I said. “Let’s each go our way and we can meet at the station this evening.”
“I’m sure you won’t echo that,” said Jason, looking smilingly at the girl. “I see heaven before me and he wants to shut me out. There’s an unnatural brother for you.”
“It seems unkind, don’t it, Renny? We hadn’t thought to give you the slip, Mr. Trender. Why, really, till now I didn’t even know of your existence.”
“That’s Renalt’s way, of course. He always wanted to keep the good things to himself. But I’ve been in London quite a long time now, Miss Mellison, and he hasn’t even mentioned me to you.”
Dolly gave me a glance half-perplexed, half-reproachful.
“Why didn’t you, Renny?”
I struggled to beat down the answer that was on my lips: “Because I thought him no fit company for you.”
“I didn’t see why I should,” I said, coolly. “I’m not bound to make my friends his.”
“How rude you are—and your own brother! Don’t mind him, Mr. Trender. He can be very unpleasant when he chooses.”
She smiled at him and my heart sunk. Was it possible that his eyes—his low musical voice—could he be taking her captive already?
“Come,” I said, roughly. “We’re losing the morning chattering here, Dolly. You’re not wanted, Jason. That’s the blunt truth.”
Dolly gave a little, pained cry of deprecation.
“Don’t, Renny! It’s horrible of you.”
“I can’t help it,” I said, savagely. “He’s as obtuse as a tortoise. He ought to see he’s in the way.”
“You give me credit for too delicate a discrimination, my good brother. But I’ll go if I’m not wanted.”
“No, you sha’n’t, Mr. Trender. I won’t be a party to such behavior.”
I turned upon the girl with a white face, I could feel.
“Dolly,” I said, hoarsely. “If he goes with you, I don’t!”
Her face flushed with anger for the first time in my knowledge of her.
“You can do just as you like, Renny, and spoil my day if you want to. But I haven’t given you the right to order me about as if I was a child.”
Without another word I turned upon my heel and left them. I was furious with a conflicting rage of emotions—detestation of my brother, anger toward Dolly, baffled vanity and mad disappointment. In a moment the sunshine of the day had been tortured into gloom. The sting of that was the stab I felt most keenly in the first tumult of my passion. That this soft caprice of sex I had condescended to so masterfully in my thoughts should turn upon and defy me! I had not deemed such a thing possible. Had she only played with me after all, coquetting and humoring and rending after the manner of her kind? Were it so, she should hear of the mere pity that had driven me to patronizing consideration of her claims; should learn of my essential indifference to her in a very effectual manner.
I am ashamed to recall the first violence with which, in my mind, I tortured that poor gentle image. As my rage cooled, it wrought, I must confess, an opposite revenge. Then Dolly became in my eyes a treasure more desirable than ever, now my chance of gaining her seemed shaken. I thought of all her tender moods and pretty ways, so that my eyes filled with tears. I had behaved rudely, had shocked her gentle sense of decorum. And here, by reason of an exaggerated spleen, had I thrown her alone into the company of the very man whose influence over her I most dreaded.
And what would Duke say—Duke, who in noble abrogation of his own claims had so pathetically committed to my care this child of his deep unselfish love?
I had been walking rapidly in the opposite direction to that I fancied the other two would take; and now I stopped and faced about, scared with a sudden shock of remorse.
What a fool, a coward, a traitor to my trust I had been! I must retrace my steps at once and seek them up and down the forest alleys. I started off in panic haste, sweating with the terror of what I had done. I plunged presently into the woods, and for a couple of hours hurried hither and thither without meeting them.
By and by, breaking into the open again, I came upon an inn, favored of tourists, that stood back from a road. I was parched and exhausted, and thought a glass of beer would revive me to a fresh start. Walking into the tap I passed by the open door of the coffee-room, and there inside were they seated at a table together, and a waiter was uncorking a bottle of champagne behind them.
Why didn’t I go in then and there? I had found my quarry and the game might yet be mine. Ask the stricken lover who will pursue his lady hotly through anxious hours and then, when he sees her at last, will saunter carelessly by as if his heart were cold to her attractions. Some such motive, in a form infinitely baser, was mine. I may call it pride, and hear the wheel creak out a sardonic laugh.
“They seem happy enough without me,” my heart said, but my conscience knew the selfishness that must nurse an injury above any sore need of the injurer.
Their voices came to me happy and merry. They had not seen me. I drank my beer and stole outside miserably temporizing with my duty.
“She sha’n’t escape again,” I thought; “I’ll go a little distance off and watch.”
I waited long, but they never came. At length, stung to desperation, I strode back to the inn and straight into the coffee-room. It was empty. Seeing a waiter, I asked him if the lady and gentleman who had lunched at such a table had left.
“Yes,” he said. He believed the lady and gentleman had gone into the forest by the garden way.
Then I was baffled again. Surely the curse of the virago of the morning was operating after all.
Evening drew on, and at last there was no help for it but to make for the station and catch our usual train back to town.
They were standing on the platform when I reached it. I walked straight up to them. Dolly flushed crimson when she saw me and then went pale as a windflower, but she never spoke a word.
“Hullo!” said Jason. “The wanderer returned. We’ve had a rare day of it; and you have, too, no doubt.”
I spoke steadily, with a set determination to prove master of myself.
“I’ve been looking for you all day. Dolly, I’m sorry I left you in a temper. Please forgive me, dear.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, indifferently and weariedly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“But it does matter to me, Dolly, very much, to keep your good opinion.”
She turned and looked at me with a strange expression, as if she were on the point of bursting into tears, but she only ended with a little formless laugh and looked away again.
“I don’t think you can value my good opinion much, and I’m sure I don’t know why you should.”
The train lunging in at this point stopped our further talk; and, once seated in it, the girl lay back in her corner with closed eyes as if asleep.
Jason sat silent, with folded arms, the lamplight below the shadow cast by his hat brim emphasizing the smile on his firmly curved lips; and I, for my part, sat silent also, for my heart seemed sick unto death.
At the terminus Dolly would have no further escort home. She was tired out, she said, and begged only we would see her into an omnibus and go our ways without her.
As the vehicle lumbered off I turned fiercely upon my brother.
“You dog!” I said, in a low, stern voice; “tell me the meaning of this.”
He gave a little, mocking, airy laugh and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, wheeled round upon me.
“What’s your question?” said he.
“You know. What have you said to the girl to make her treat me like this?”
He raised his eyebrows in assumed perplexity.
“Really,” he said, “you go a long way to seek. What have I said? How have you behaved, you mean.”
“You lie—I don’t! I know her, that’s enough. If you have told her my story——”
“If?” he repeated, coolly.
“I may add a last chapter to it, in which you’ll figure—that’s all.”
He was a little startled, I could see, but retained his sang froid, with an effort.
“You jump too much to conclusion, my good fellow. I have said nothing to her about your little affair with Modred as yet.”
“That means you intend to hold it over my head as a menace where she is concerned. I know you.”
“Then you know a very charming fellow. Why, what a dolt you are! Here’s a pother because I play cavalier to a girl whom you throw over in a fit of sulks. I couldn’t do less in common decency.”
“Take care that you do no more. I’m not the only one to reckon with in this business.”
“A fig for that!” he cried, snapping his fingers. “I’m not to be coerced into taking second place if I have a fancy for first.”
“I warn you; that’s enough. For the rest, let’s understand one another. I’ll have no more of this sham for convention’s sake. We’re enemies, and we’ll be known for enemies. My door’s shut to you. Keep out of my way and think twice before you make me desperate.”
With that I turned and strode from him. His mocking laugh came after me again, but I took no notice of it.
Should I tell Duke all? I shrunk from the mere thought. A coward even then, I dared not confess to him how I had betrayed my trust; what fearful suspicions of the nature of my failure lay dark on my heart. No—I must see Dolly first and force my sentence from her lips.
He put down the book he was reading from, as I entered the sitting-room.
“Well,” he said, cheerily, “what success?”
I sat away from him, beyond the radiance of the lamp, and affected to be busy unlacing my boots.
“I can’t say as yet, Duke. Do you mind postponing the question for a day or two?”
“Of course, if you wish it.” I felt the surprise in his tone. “Mayn’t I ask why?”
“Not now, old fellow. I missed my opportunity, that’s all.”
“Is anything wrong, Renny?”
“Not all right, at least.”
“Renny, why shouldn’t it be? I can’t be mistaken as to the direction of her feelings—by my soul, I can’t.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said, in a voice of great distress.
He recognized it and stopped questioning me at once.
“You want to be alone, I see,” said he, gently. “Well, I’ll be off.”
As he passed me, he placed his hand for a moment on my shoulder. The action was tender and sympathetic, but I shrunk under it as if it had been a blow.
When the door had closed upon him I rose and sat down at the table. I wrote:
“Dear Dolly: I made a fool of myself to-day and have repented it ever since in sackcloth and ashes. I had so wished to be alone with you, dear, and it made me mad that he should come between us. He isn’t a good companion for you. I must say it, though he is my brother. Had I thought him so I should have brought him to see you before. I only say this to explain my anger at his appearance, and now I will drop the subject for another, which is the real reason of my writing. I had hoped, so much, dear, to put it to you personally, there in the old forest that we have spent so many happy hours in, but I missed my opportunity and now I am in too much of a fever to wait another week. Dolly, will you be my wife? I can afford a home of my own now, and I shall be glad and grateful if you will consent to become mistress of it. I feel that written words can only sound cold at best; so I will say nothing more here, but just this—if you will have me, I will strive in all things to be your loving and devoted husband.“Renalt Trender.”
“Dear Dolly: I made a fool of myself to-day and have repented it ever since in sackcloth and ashes. I had so wished to be alone with you, dear, and it made me mad that he should come between us. He isn’t a good companion for you. I must say it, though he is my brother. Had I thought him so I should have brought him to see you before. I only say this to explain my anger at his appearance, and now I will drop the subject for another, which is the real reason of my writing. I had hoped, so much, dear, to put it to you personally, there in the old forest that we have spent so many happy hours in, but I missed my opportunity and now I am in too much of a fever to wait another week. Dolly, will you be my wife? I can afford a home of my own now, and I shall be glad and grateful if you will consent to become mistress of it. I feel that written words can only sound cold at best; so I will say nothing more here, but just this—if you will have me, I will strive in all things to be your loving and devoted husband.
“Renalt Trender.”
All in a glow of confident tenderness, inspired by the words I had written, I added the address and went out and posted my little missive. Its mere composition, the fact of its now lying in the postbox, a link between us, gave me a chastened sense of relief and satisfaction that was restorative to my injured vanity. The mistake of the morning was reacted upon in time, and I felt that nothing short of a disruption of natural affinities could interfere to keep back the inevitable answer. So assured was I, indeed, that I allowed my thoughts to wander as if for a last farewell, into regions wherein the simple heart of my present could find no way to enter. “Good-by, Zyp,” the voiceless soul of me muttered.
That night, looking at Duke’s dark head at rest on the pillow, I thought: “It will be put right to-morrow or the next day, and you, dear friend, need never know what might have followed on my abuse of your trust.” Then I slept peacefully, but my dreams were all of Zyp—not of the other.
The next day, at the office, I was careful to keep altogether out of Dolly’s way. Indeed, my work taking me elsewhere, I never once saw her and went home in the evening unenlightened by a single glance from her gray eyes. This, the better policy, I thought, would save us both embarrassment and the annoyance of any curiosity on the part of her fellow-workers, who would surely be quick to detect a romantic state of affairs between us.
Nevertheless, despite my self-confidence, I awaited that evening in some trepidation the answer that was to decide the direction of my future.
We were sitting at supper when it came, held by one corner in her apron by our landlady, and my face went pale as I saw the schoolgirl superscription.
“From Dolly?” murmured Duke.
I nodded and broke the seal. My hands trembled and a mist was before my eyes. It ran as follows:
“Dear Renny: Thank you very, very much for your kind offer, but I can’t accept it. I thought I had so much to say, and this is all I can think of. I hope it won’t hurt you. It can’t, I know, for long, because now I see I was never really the first in your heart; and your letter don’t sound as if you will find it very difficult to get over. Please forgive me if I’m wrong, but anyhow it’s too late now. I might have once, but I can’t now, Renny. I think perhaps I became a woman all in a moment yesterday. Please don’t write or say a word to me again about this, for I mean it really and truly. Your affectionate friend,Dolly Mellison.”“P. S.—It was a little unfair of you, I must say, not to tell me about that Zyp.”
“Dear Renny: Thank you very, very much for your kind offer, but I can’t accept it. I thought I had so much to say, and this is all I can think of. I hope it won’t hurt you. It can’t, I know, for long, because now I see I was never really the first in your heart; and your letter don’t sound as if you will find it very difficult to get over. Please forgive me if I’m wrong, but anyhow it’s too late now. I might have once, but I can’t now, Renny. I think perhaps I became a woman all in a moment yesterday. Please don’t write or say a word to me again about this, for I mean it really and truly. Your affectionate friend,
Dolly Mellison.”
“P. S.—It was a little unfair of you, I must say, not to tell me about that Zyp.”
I sat and returned the letter to its folds quite coolly and calmly. If there was fire in me, I kept it under then.
“Duke,” I said, quietly, “she has refused me.”
He struggled up from his chair. His face was all amazement and his voice hoarse.
“Refused you? What have you said? What have you done? Something has happened, I tell you.”
“Why? She was at perfect liberty to make her own choice.”
“You wrote to her last night?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you? Why didn’t you do as I understood you intended to yesterday?”
“I asked you to leave that question alone for the present.”
“You’ve no right to. I——” his face flamed up for a moment. But with a mighty effort he fought it under.
“Renny,” he said, in a subdued voice, “I had no business to speak to you like that. But you don’t know upon what a wheel of torment I have been these last weeks. The girl—Dolly—is so much to me, and her happiness——” he broke off almost with a sob.
I sprung to my feet. I could bear it no longer.
“Think what you like of me!” I cried. “I have made a muddle of the whole business—a wretched, unhappy muddle. But I suffer, too, Duke. I never knew what Miss—Miss Mellison was to me till now, when I have lost her.”
“I don’t ask to see her letter. You haven’t misread it by any possibility?”
“No—it’s perfectly clear. She refuses me and holds out no hope.”
He set his frowning brows and fell into a gloomy silence. He took no notice of me even when I told him that I must go into the open air for awhile to walk and try to find surcease of my racking trouble.
“Now,” I thought, when I got outside, “for the villainous truth. To strike at me like that! It was worthy of him—worthy of him. And I am to blame for leaving them together—I, who pretended to an affection for the girl and was ready to swear to love and protect her forevermore. What a pitiful rag of manliness! What courage that daren’t even now tell the truth to my friend up there! Friend? He’s done with me, I expect. But for the other. He didn’t give her my history—not he. Perhaps he didn’t as I meant it, but I never dreamed that he would play upon that second stop for his devils of hate to dance to; I never even thought of it. What a hideous fool I have been! Oh, Jason, my brother, if it had only been you instead of Modred!”
I jerked to a stop. Some formless thoughts had been in my mind to hurry on into the presence of the villain who had dealt me such a coward blow, and to drive his slander in one red crash down his throat. Now, in an instant, it broke upon me that I had no knowledge of where he lived—that by my own act I had yesterday cut off all communication between us. Perhaps, though, in his cobra-like dogging of me he would be driven before long to seek me out again of his own accord, that he might gloat over the havoc he had occasioned. I must bide my time as patiently as I could on the chance.
Late at night I returned and lay down upon the sofa in the sitting-room. I felt unclean for Duke’s company and would not go up to him. Let me do myself justice. It was not all dread of his anger that kept me from him. There was a most lost, sorrowful feeling in me at having thus requited all his friendship and his generosity.
As I lay and writhed in sickly thought, my eye was attracted by the glimmering of some white object set prominently on the mantelpiece. I rose and found it was a letter addressed to me in his handwriting. Foreseeing its contents I tore it open and read: